I recently started following Planet Python, and two posts by Mike Pirnat caught
my attention: I have to admit that if after the
first post
I did not really try to learn too much about Blogofile, --
“Yet another blog engine”, he thought -- the
second post,
however, got me more interested: pushing a changeset to publish a new blog
post, that looked exciting and I decided to learn more. That led to
this blog.

I've been meaning to start a technical blog for some time now, but I never
quite found a setup that would look appealing enough for me to do it.
Blogofile got me started: let's find out why.

Not a $wordpress

I guess that we all fall for free stuff or simplicity, but
I'm still fairly amazed by the number of developer blogs that are hosted
on Blogger or Wordpress.com: my experiments with those services have not been so
great, and most of all, posting any kind of code seemed, at the time,
difficult. But, fair enough, setup is simple, and every penny you save is
a penny you can spend on troll food.
Using a blog platform was not an option for me: I want control over the content I
serve, and, ideally, a blog would only be a starting point.

But then, for those that do spend time setting up a blog themselves, why
would you pick $wordpress? ($wordpress being a placeholder for any CMS serving
content dynamically). And this applies to me as well: why did I only consider
dynamic applications so far?
Afterall, we're geeks, we're good coders!
We write blogs about code generation or compilation, Vim good practices,
about details of load balancing or cache invalidations,
but we would not be able to come up with a few lines of Python to generate
HTML from a set of files formatted with ReST or markdown?
Ridiculous! No, the reality is that most of us have hard-coded the blog == dynamic equivalence in our minds, and that it's hard to work around it.

Static goodness

What's dynamic in a blog? Article content, and comments. Do we need a database for
this? I say that comments can be handled by Disqus: you can argue with that,
I'm pretty sure that the FSF will someday pick up a fight against such
platforms, but the service is good enough for me, and I can risk losing
this data. For articles, you are in control, and from my viewpoint, we
can afford to regenerate pages each time we write a post.A blog is not this dynamic.

Fireballs

We're getting fairly good at serving dynamic content. But still see a lot
of blogs that get fireballed or go down
after a couple hundred visits from a news aggregator: setting up a dynamic stack is quite
easy; mastering this art is something else.
Static content, on the other hand, is easier: Nginx with proper Cache-Control
is a good start.

Security

My first hacks as a kid were done on PHP. I used PHP to send and receive
Caesar cyphered blobs to my friends; I was creating pages issuing 50 or so
unindexed requests to MySQL... I was young.
I then forgot about this sandbox. And when a nostalgic myself visited it
years later... My browser blocked my request, warning me that I was accessing
a malicious website. Hacked, of course :)
Static content means less things to sanitize, less permission issues. Happy me.

User control

I'm the kind of person that has troubles writing a lot of text without my
favorite editor. Here, I wrote this post in Vim. I hit :make,
the site is regenerated. I have a “high-end” SimpleHTTPServer
running in background, and I can preview everything offline, without a
complex setup. I also know that everything I view offline will be rendered as-is
online: no backend can play tricks on us.

I version everything in a Mercurial repository.“Backups” are achieved with a simple hg clone. “Deployments”? hg push and a changegroup hook.

The core blogofile sources are a mere 1200 lines of Python.
The blog controller is an additional 500 lines.
That's really easy to analyze or patch, if you think that will ever need this.

So here we are, a simple static blog, with a fairly simple skin derived from
the default Blogofile blog. Untested under IE: if you encounter some troubles,
feel free to submit patches to the repository on Bitbucket.

What should you expect?

Not much content about romance, but surely some about Sarcasm, Math and
Language! I'm mostly into Python: my first posts are likely to cover details of
Mercurial, Zope or ERP5, CPython or various other Python interpreters.
I'll categorize posts accordingly so that readers can select a topic or another.